By the time he gets to the Enola Gay, I picture his demeanor as "just going about his rounds."

If that makes any sense.

Well, if you look at chapter one, World War I was something to be tired of. He's been doing his rounds for a very long time. Subjectively speaking.

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" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

The notion of his acts being maintenance runs chills up my spine. I'm scared.

The last 2 chapters were from a nightmare I had last night, so you're not alone in this.

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" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

And while, dear readers, the ladies find out that sometimes you take horrible things back with you when you return from a trip (especially when you end your trip in such a hasty manner), let's all sit back and enjoy a lecture from Frank. Or rather, from Frank's diary.

After World War II, and after the Korean War, after the HUAC committees and the senseless & mindless conformity of the 1950s, a wizard came to America. This wizard raised walls of gold, a beautiful Camelot that captured the public's eye, and drove off Mordred (in the person of a trollish little man from Yorba Linda) for 10 years.

Everyone was looking at the handsome wizard and his beautiful wife, and at the castle of gold. Nobody was looking anywhere else...Which in itself should have been an indication that something was very wrong in the realm.

Then one day in Dallas, the wizard was assassinated. Without him, the spell rotted; the golden walls folded up in the night like a carnival that has good & urgent reasons to leave town, revealing the napalm-drenched, bomb-ruined ripe paddies of a foreign nation behind where those walls had stood. And crowning himself in the wizard's stead was a pig-eyed monster from Texas, while 2,000,000 Vietnamese and 55,000 Americans lined up at the slaughterhouse chute.

What this ought to demonstrate is that you can't trust wizards, you can't believe in golden castles, and no matter how anyone tries to dress it up, the 20th century is and was one giant & bloody meathook. Because all those dystopian writers like Kafka and Gibson were dead wrong about one thing: the meathook world isn't the future, it's the past. And it's hungry.

We now return you to the ladies' story, which has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Rita

We were, as always, uncermoniously dumped on the floor of the bar's bathroom, directly beneath the mirror. Here's the part I don't get...They took the sinks out, but couldn't manage a gym pad for the floor? Janet was out...Not unconsciously but badly stunned. As my head spun, I heard the marines guarding the place howling, and they rushed in the room around me.

"No shooting!", I hollered, as I turned around. But what I saw when I finished turning made my blood run cold. Heydrich was halfway out of the mirror, from the waist up. His eyes were now longer pale blue...Instead both eyes were entirely a sickly fish-belly white. His skin was grey and his mouth was distorted in a bellow that sounded like an air raid siren, and which made that mouth about 5 times too large for his head.

The marines crowded around him, stabbing him with their bayonets, which they hadn't had time to install on their rifles.

In short order, Heydrich stopped fighting, and began to rapidly decompose. The marine officer took his men for a debriefing, and suggested that maybe we should talk to our own boss. I dialed him on his cell phone.

"General Johnson."

"Sir, it's Rita and Janet. We didn't catch our man...And we just had a Nazi try to follow us up out of 20C."

"Did he manage it?"

"No, the marines did him in."

"Well that's good news. I do have some bad news, though, that dovetails with what you're telling me. I need you back at the office right away."

"What's up?"

"Some very serious anomolies. I can't discuss it over the phone. Let's just say that your dead Nazi over there isn't alone."

To be continued

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" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

General Johnson turned on the monitor on the wall. It showed a still shot from a security camera, with a man standing in the center of the shot. The man was wearing a double-breasted suit and a fedora. He had a horrified look on his face, his eyes wide, and his hands were on the side of his face like in the painting The Scream.

"I'd say this gentleman", the general began, "looks a little startled."

"And?", I asked.

"Well, watch this." The general backed the footage up, and played it. The space the man was standing in was empty at first, then there was a fog of some sort forming, looking almost pixilated. Then the outline of the man appeared, and then solidified as the fog vanished. The man did a comedic double-take, then his hands shot up to his face, and the footage paused exactly where it had been when we first viewed it.

"Between his clothing and his reaction, I'm thinking he's gonna be your problem", the general continued.

"Oh, shit", Rita said slowly, "He's leaked out of the past, hasn't he?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

"We have him?"

"The Chicago police have him. They have him in an observation cell until we can get someone out to him."

"Can we just have him shipped here?", I asked, "We're kind of busy."

"I suppose that's reasonable", the general replied, "I'll see that it happens."

Frank's Diary

Now, after ten years had gone by, the troll returned from Yorba Linda. He took the throne from the pig-eyed monster that had sat in it since the wizard died, and got to work. It was no secret that the troll hated everyone in the realm; in fact, he'd said as much, many times. But when he took over, he cleaned the air up, he cleaned the water up, he put in motion the things that would stop the horrible, pointless war that the realm was embroiled in.

Nobody's really sure why the troll did these things, though some of the more iconoclastic suggested that maybe - just maybe - the troll wasn't a troll at all, he was just a man who felt a need to vocalize his feelings about how he'd been treated by Eisenhower and the public in general. When he was Eisenhower's vice president, Ike laughed out loud when asked if the troll would run for office in 1960. And the troll almost won anyway, but did in fact lose...And he lost with the awful knowledge that he would have been president, if only Ike hadn't laughed at him. I think that would make anyone butthurt. Then he did something dumb and inexplicable, and was marched out of office.

The funniest thing, and the point I'm trying to get to, is that maybe the troll wasn't part of the 20th century's plan. Maybe he was something different entirely, and 20C took steps to remove him from the picture. The troll wouldn't have indulged in the Vietnam war, for example. He wasn't interested in cold war theatrics. And knowing what I know of this hideous century, that meant he had to go.

To be continued.

Logged

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement."

I always thought there was something screwy about the 1960s as advertized.

Logged

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Yowza. It hits me in kind of a weird way, since I was only around for the last 9.5 years of 20C, and I was a bit preoccupied by poking bugs with sticks. The 21st C was definitely handed to us with a sense of "Don't worry about all that, it's fine."

Then some guys blew a hole in the world with airplanes and all this stuff came leaking out.